Wilhelm List’s The Embrace – A Moment Suspended in Tenderness

“Give me a few days of peace in your arms. I need it terribly. I’m ragged, worn, exhausted. After that I can face the world.”

(Henry Miller, From a letter to Anais Nin, featured in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953)

Wilhelm List (Austrian, 1864-1918), The Embrace, c 1905

Wilhelm List’s beautiful painting “The Embrace”, painted in 1905, caught my eye some time ago. I feel like it would be far more popular if Klimt had painted it. Wilhelm List is not as iconic as Klimt, for sure, but he was one of the Viennese artists associated with the Secession movement and he often infused his works with a sense of Symbolist mystery, hushed eroticism, and dreamlike beauty. In the painting “The Embrace” a man and a woman are caught in the intimacy of closeness. They are leaning into one another, wrapped in a gesture that is at once physical and spiritual.

The painting belongs to that charming fin-de-siècle Viennese mood where art hovers perpetually between sensuality and introspection and often seeks to capture moments of psychological truth rather than an outward narrative. In “The Embrace” the palette is soft but still saturated. The bodies are rendered with warmth against a muted background that seems to dissolve into abstraction. Still, the abstraction is not too detailed the way it would be in a painting by Klimt. This focus isolates the figures in their own private little world, a world where the sharp darts of reality cannot reach and pierce the idyll. This way, their closeness becomes the true subject of the work. The woman’s long, wavy hair is falling down like a waterfall of gold all over the man’s shoulders and the colour is almost blending with his skin. It is her hair that creates a sense of their private, dreamy world, actually, because the faces of two lovers are inbetween those two waterfalls of gold. Her soft golden hair, his arms around her waist, her bosom just close enough – oh what a place for a man to be! A safe haven. What strikes the viewer is not their overt passion but the quiet but palpable tenderness. The embrace feels less like a fleeting gesture and more like a moment of fusion, where boundaries between self and the other blur. It recalls Symbolist explorations of love as both a union and mystery, as something fragile, ineffable, yet deeply human.

Gustav Klimt, Love, 1895

In Vienna at the turn of the century, artists such as Klimt, Schiele and List were preoccupied with themes of love, death, and transcendence. “The Embrace” can be seen in this context: a painting that does not shout but whispers, presenting intimacy not as spectacle but as a suspended, timeless experience. The figures exist in a realm that feels outside ordinary time, as if to suggest that in the act of holding one another, they enter a sacred state. There is a touch of some indescribable faint melancholy, too, just like a hush of the violin or Chopin’s Nocturne, in the way their bodies curve, as though love is both a solace and a recognition of fragility. Like much Symbolist art, it reminds us that tenderness always carries the awareness of its own impermanence. In “The Embrace” List distills the universal desire to hold and be held. It is a painting of love in its quietest form: not the thunderclap of passion, but the soft, enduring hum of human closeness. As you can see above, Klimt’s painting “Love”, painted ten years before List’s painting, sort of carries a similar mood, but it feels more literal, more tied to the times whereas List’s lovers feel timeless.